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Talk:Treasure/@comment-1333593-20170623152232/@comment-178.5.217.236-20171004104329
Again, this post is related to your upcoming Encounter Zone article and is not really related to Treasure. "It is quite possible that the divisor ends up being so high that the remaining (secondary) budget will be too small for any creature once it is divided by it. In this case, there will simply be no secondary monster. This is different from determining primary guardians, which are always present as long as the total budget allows any." I tested this myself because I felt like you would get secondary monsters most of the times, even for Nature lairs where War Bears might be a little expensive for secondary budget divided by ~4. In MoM Tweaker I loaded Magic.exe, went to EXE:Customizer, changed some values and saved the changes to Magic.exe. First I changed the budget of lairs, putting the monster cash values all to 1, so weak lairs should be empty and normal lairs should have a budget of exactly 100 on Arcanus and 200 on Myrror. Secondly, I changed "Nr monsters in lair (dice)" to 2 (primary budget is divided by only 1 or 2 to determine the primary monster type) and "Lower primary monsters (dice)" to 9 to make it unprobable that the algorithm puts 1 primary monster back for a larger secondary budget. Then I started a game at Hard difficulty (1.31) and looked how lairs were composed with the help of the Tweaker. Death lairs with a budget of 200 (Myrror) now almost looked like this: 2 Ghouls, 1 Zombie. 2 Ghouls is obvious, you should get that no matter if you divide primary budget by 1 or 2. However, the 1 Zombie suggests, that the algorithm tries to fill a lair with a secondary creature even if the secondary budget divided by random number is too small. If primary monster generation fails, the game chooses "buy the cheapest creature, as many units as possible", here it seems to be "buy the most expensive affordable creature" not sure if it is always 1 unit or as many units as possible. Nature lairs with a budget of 200 (Myrror) were also interesting: You always found either War Bears (divisor = 2) or Earth Elementals (divisor = 1) as primary creatures. You would have expected to get Sprites (cost = 100) and Giant Spiders (cost = 200). I think the budget was really exactly 200 because I saw Life lairs with 4 Guardian Spirits inside. I also think that the costs of Sprites and Spiders are correct, I could imagine that we got one cost wrong, but both - no way! So, the problem seems to be with the algorithm which determines the monster types. You would expect it to be monster type is obtainable if "monster cost <= budget / randomInt" (lower or equal) but it seems to be if "moster cost < budget / randomInt" (genuinely/purely smaller). Would be nice if you could make further investigation in this regard. My options seem to be limited. I couldn't change monster costs in Tweaker. I tried to open Wizard.exe, went to all Unit Types (Global) and changed the costs there but it didn't affect lairs. I know that Seravy had changed lairs' monster costs in 1.50.